AT&T Nokia Lumia 920 1308 firmware update is now available

On top of an already busy day for Windows Phone users, those with an AT&T Nokia Lumia 920 will be pleased to know that the 1308 firmware is now available to download over-the-air. We told you it was coming last week and it’s now here.

Before and after photos with new Nokia firmware (Image credit: Axefield)

Nokia has been quiet as to the specific changelog with the 1308 firmware, especially for AT&T. We’ve reached out though for clarity and to see when it will come to other 920 owners who are either unlocked or on other carriers. [Update: Some of the improvements include "proximity sensor parameters, improved automatic display brightness adjustment & performance improvements" in addition to the camera fixes and Storage tools option]

For now, those on AT&T can go into Settings > Phone Update and check the server. You will need Wi-Fi for the download portion and no, this does not update the OS just the firmware.

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AT&T Nokia Lumia 920 1308 firmware update is now available

I took the upgrade yesterday, and since then I'm not sure I've been able to sync mail with Hotmail/Outlook. Can't imagine the firmware upgrade would have anything to do with it, but I'm posting this out there to see if anyone else has experienced anything similar.

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Updated to 1308. Everything went smooth. In 9 min my Lumia 920 was ready to use again. Yes, Proximity sensor is working fine. It appear to be doing litle better for sound quality and over all performance.

This update really took a dump on my battery life ... used to end the day at 80%, now in the 50's, worse if I'm on the web, answering email or checking social networks ... NO improvement after battery discharge (WOW did it get HOT doing this) and soft reset ... argghh

This is just an informational post. Since the update Pandora crashes and my Bluetooth keeps disconnecting and reconnecting. I really don't know if the update is that cause for the Pandora crashes since the app is so new but I have never had issues with the Bluetooth before today.

This update sucks. What's the pt of freeing up 5 gigs when you can't even get service where you previously could? Shows three bars LTE but when I check email goes to no service. Phone is worthless right now!

Updated my girls l920 for her. I updated all Nokia apps she wanted and backed up the phone. It took all of 10mins from download to install. I do notice a huge improvement in photos. Everything else not as noticeable. That's 2 l920 updated without any problems. I haven't notice excessive battery drains either. Guess I'm just in the lucky camp.

PS. On behalf of all of us in Europe/UK I'd like to say fcuk you Nokia for getting into bed with AT&T and forgetting those of us that kept you alive in the dark years. Now we get updates months and months later, so much for loyalty.

This may not be related to this firmware, but this morning when I woke up some of my apps that rely on GPS are giving me the wrong state and city. IE both weather apps, redbox, etc. Nokia 'Here' apps are working fine though. Anyone else having similar issues?

So is this why they delayed the Instagram on Windows Phone announcement? I'm saying it is keeping with the suspicion that it is what Belfiore was about to announce was in fact Instagram on Windows Phone Monday.

Check out one of my previous posts regarding a "Bricked" phone. You can get use of your phone again, but you are going to lose everything on there, but of course it is quicker than waiting for a new phone to be shipped to you, and you will lose everything anyways.

Actually what I said for unbricking a phone was:
Unplug your phone, do a hard reset (vol down, power, camera at the same time), hold down the volume down key for 5 seconds, then plug in the charger. An exclamation point will show on the screen, then press vol up, vol down, power, vol down. Then leave the phone plugged in for 20 minutes or so. This should bring your phone back to life. It is what worked for me to thanks to nokia chat support. You will lose your settings but it is worth it. Good luck!

This update screwed up my phone. Now the touch is all messed up, overly sensitive, can barely type in my pass code, screen locks up constantly now, and screen is very jittery trying to scroll through the start screen. I would not suggest doing this update and waiting.

Seems like they addressed something with the vibration when you hit the back button. The vibration isn't as strong(it may not be as long as that could make the vibration feel stronger). I obviously don't know why they did it but im theorizing either to prolong the life of the vibration motor or maybe to address some battery drain issues.

I'm glad they bring this long awaited update that includes the "storage" fix.But it's very unusual that they rolled it out for the 920 wich is the very least to need this (with those 32 Gb of storage).
WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF US?!?! We cannot use our HTC's 8s ,8x, Lumia 820, 620 etc...because we don't have enough space left!!! We cannot install apps, games...a lots of things.This is BS!

With ATT in the system settings its the very last option. Took about 15 mins to download and install. I don't notice a difference in smoothmest but I'm sure happy about the storage check option. My pictures seem to be sharper. Will compare and update my girls L920 when she gets home.

I am on ATT and I think I have the update (1232.5957.1308.0001 firmware), but Storage Check is definitely not in my settings. I have looked at every item in settings, but it is not there. Is this not the correct update?

my phone didn't notify me of the update, I manually clicked 'Check for updates' it found it and then updated okay. I think Daniel mentioned to someone else in another post that we may have to wait a day or two for the store to show the app updates. In other words the firmware allows the app to work, but we don't have the app yet

I am in CA - downloaded in a minute or two. But the install has been going for 45min - 1 hour, and it's still on "Almost Done". The % complete is still slowly rising, but I'm on step 1 of 4. Basically, don't believe their 20-30min warning - it could be WAY longer.

Is it just me or the automatic brightness adjuster is extra sensitive now? I've been in the same room for the last 45 minutes without any change in lighting and I feel the brightness adjusts every 3-5 minutes. I feel that's going to have an adverse effect on the already poor battery life on my 920.

Love the storage check. Details are fine tuned to tell you what is gobbling space. It is hard to believe more than a gig of temp files can remain even after a reboot. (2.6gb to be more accurate) Now only 6 GB used on my 920. Great job Nokia.

Not noticing much of a difference. Loving the ability to clear that "other" garbage out. Saved nearly 5gb! I would love to see a comparison of the camera before/after the update to see what got better with that

Wonder if Bluetooth enhancements coming via OS updates or should be a firmware? I know huge issue with BT connectivity for vehicles. I'm noticing horrible battery life just after update. Went from 85% to 65% and says 2hrs remaining. All in about 40 mins after update.

Try recharging your device before hand. I find sometimes that the estimated about isn't always reliable, and I have to either do a soft reset or charge the battery up. I've got 96% left and about 1 day and 6 mins remaining.

I used to see 1 day + times after I first got. Has never been longer than 11-12 hours for the past month or so, and have most everything tthat is usually culprit for battery issues. I charged for a bit and now, strangely, at 69% is showing 1 day+. So maybe the fixed something. Hope so!

installed just fine. one thing I noticed, for me anyways. when I update my 920, and put it on the wireless charging pad it shuts off the phone and I have to do a soft reset or w/e to get it back up. the portico update that happened and I didnt notice it until later in the day. I updated this time, put it on the pad and 5 minutes later picked it up and it was off.

Things like over heating are never an issue with Samsung? Ever heard of the galaxies that used to explode? Lol every manufacturer has issues. What matters is that Nokia is rectifying these issues instead of leaving you with a device with some bugs. Nothings perfect.

Still no option to customize any sounds the phone makes. Unbelievable. Welcome to 2005, Microsoft. Absolutely appalling this feature STILL isn't there. If it doesn't come by the time in eligible for a new contract, goodbye Windows Phone. Unforgivable that they can't match the competition or themselves in basic smartphone features. Oh, and great job on the "other" storage fix. Instead of having 6GB of storage taken away I now have only 3GBs of storage taken up for no reason.

I'd believe that if the head of WP8, Joe Belfiore didn't tweet about the other issue being fixed. Unless Nokia decides what the OS stores in the other category then I'd say Microsoft was directly involved in this update. I don't believe that to be the case, so I'm going to say that while fixes came out for the Nokia hardware, there were OS level updates to fix this issue.

Take a deep breath and relax. It's gonna be OK.
(1) Sound options were never indicated to be part of this update, so that complaint really belongs somewhere else. (2) How do you know there is "no reason" for your phone to be using 3gb of Other space? The amount of space used varies by user, so obviously the amount depends on how you use your phone. Seems like most posters here are reporting a decrease of around 50%. That's what I got too.

1.) It should have been included in day one, there's no excuse for such a basic smartphone feature that's a number of years old now wasn't included. Microsoft has to be directly involved in fixing an OS level issue with the other storage, and I'm getting really tired of WP8 missing features that have been around in smartphones for about 10 years now. No excuse that they can't get on top of this now, they are way behind on many features as it stands, the longer they sit around doing nothing, and they pretty much are, the further they fall behind.

2.) I don't store email, I don't have a lot of stored cache in the web browser, and all the other memory for apps, music, and the like are all accounted for. Why is 10% of my available storage gone in a category that has no name? What is it? Why is it there? What uses it? Before this update it was taking up almost 20% of my available storage. Without having an SD card to expand this, I don't like having this mysterious category eating up almost 1/4 of my storage. There's no reason for this because I have nothing on there that should take up space like that. Again, and I hate to make this comparison because I really like my 920, all the iPhones I owned before this phone never had10-20% of my storage sucked up for no discernible reason. Game saves can't possibly take that up, photo uploads have no reason to stick around in memory, and I can't think of one single instance of it being needed permanently, much less growing at an alarming rate forcing people to wipe their phones just to get back their space. I know a few people with 8X's that had over 50% of their storage sucked up by other and were forced to wipe their phones every few weeks just so they could use it. Why does this issue exist? There's no logical reason for this problem to exist, and now with idiotic carrier update restrictions people have no clue how long they'll have to wait for the OS to screw them out of a less arbitrary amount of memory being taken up.

You do realize that Windows Phone 8 was not a build on Windows Phone 7 right? This was a complete build from the ground up which is the reason old devices cannot upgrade to the WP8 OS. So now knowing that WP8 is in fact a first generation OS, that might explain why some features such as customizable sounds etc was not included yet. For a first go at this new OS, I am quite happy with the software and the Nokia 920. I am looking forward to WP9 this fall and hope that they include even more of the missing and even more new innovations. Sure you can jump to Droid or Apple but I wouldn't abandon this platform just yet. I expect that there will be quite a leap to WP9 and yes your Nokia 920 will upgrade to it when it arrives. As for this mysterious "Other" section, I am only using 1.5 gb so not sure why your other category is so high. Something is taking it up as I am sure MS is not out to screw you over for no reason. If you are worried about storage space, I imagine you must have your phone loaded with everything under the sun. I have 14gb free so obviously storage is a lesser issue to me. Good luck my friend.

I do realize this was a clean sheet, but this isn't 2004. Not having the basics isn't excusable. Especially in the incredibly competitive market as it stands. They also aren't doing a very good job getting devs to go after WP8. Their "big release" this week were incredibly derivative/copycat games, and one that is over two years old. Offering $100 or whatever the amount was to "intice" developers to the platform was so boneheaded I don't even know where to start. No developer is going to spend 8-12 months writing an app for $100. There are many articles to the ridiculous barriers that Microsoft put up between the developer and getting games/apps out on the platform. If you need evidence of this being an issue, look at the way they run XBLA.
I never said Microsoft is out to screw me because my other section is so bloated, please don't insinutate I said things when I clearly didn't. This is a serious issue, I don't know why it's that big, you don't, and neither does every other consumer that has this problem. Releasing a brand new OS with so many basic features missing is a terrible way to "reinvent" your OS and try and compete with concrete challengers already slugging it out for dominance. If they plan on being even close to competitive, they need to at minimum have feature parity with their rivals. Right now, they aren't even close in many areas.
I am worried about storage space. Other is taking up 4.5GB of it without a reason that I can see. I'm not the only one. There are 8X owners that have had to factory reset their phones simply because it's eating up over 50% of their storage with almost no apps or media on the phone. If you don't believe me, search the forums on this very site and others like it. My phone isn't loaded with everything, I find it quite funny that you would immediately blame me for "having your phone loaded with everything under the sun" because obviously I'm the one causing the problem affecting thousands upon thousands of users.
Total: 29GB
Apps: 2.4GB
Temp files: 663mb
Photos: 1.4GB
Music+Video: 6.3GB
Office: near enough to zero to make no difference
Email and contacts: 67 mb (how is that possible?)
Maps: 130mb (I could delete these, but not enough to matter)
Ringtones: 12mb (pointless because I had hoped I could change sounds other than the default ringtone)
System: 1.6GB
Other: (now) 2.8GB AFTER cleaning everything off I don't want on there (please explain to me how this is possible)

I have 130 megabytes of maps on my phone, almost no game saves, I don't upload photos to SkyDrive, and my email gets checked every few days because it won't sync changes back to the server. What are these legitimate reasons? What are the legitimate reasons that it was using 20% of my fixed amount of storage? I can see no reason for people to have to wipe their phones because a category that doesn't explain what it does renders their phone unuseable until they factory reset it. It's a ridiculously bad bug, and I'm not happy that it still takes up 10% of my phone storage without a damn good explination of what it needs it for.

Ha, just realized you are the same guy who is claiming the 920 has the "worst camera phone you've ever used" elsewhere in this thread.

I can't tell you what other legitimate uses there are for other that would specifically apply to you. I fully agree that it would be nice if Microsoft would release more detail on exactly what is in there.

I never said that the Other section pre-update was 100% legitimate. I said that there ARE legitimate reasons for other storage. BIG difference. I think you need to slow down and read while focusing on comprehension. Clearly there was (and probably continues to be, given that MS has not issued their update for this yet... this looks like a bandaid from Nokia) a bug that was/is causing it to not release the Other space when it is done with it. Yes, this is a big problem. Luckily they have acknowledged it and claimn to be working on a fix.

Microsoft has plenty of imporovements and bug fixes to make. If you could take a much less accusatory and abrasive stance, I think you'd find many more people to be sympathetic to your issues. Most of us are not claiming that MS or WP is perfect... far from it. But exaggerating your claims and swearing and being highly confrontational are not doing you any favors.

I don't disagree that there are legitimate uses, but so far it looks like a big that is growing out of control. Like I said, with my current useage of the phone, I can see no reason that it should gobble up 20% of my available storage.

What I think of the camera has no bearing on this issue, so I don't understand why you thought to point it out other than to satisfy your own reasons to think I don't have a legitimate point that this is a serious issue. The camera was bad enough that they released at least one update to fix it. As it stands right now it looks much better than it did after the Portico update. Had you read anything other than what fit your view of my opinion, you'd know that opinion was formed before I'd had a lot of time with this current update. But hey, pick and choose what you want to read, makes your argument that much better in your eyes.

I mention the camera simply because it lends credence to my opinion that your posts today have been overeactive and confrontational (seriously... re-read them and tell me they're not). I see you have since admitted that stance about the camera is hyperbole, so no biggie... I just think you would be better off presenting your opinions in a more reasoned and less reactionary way, and without major exaggerations and inaccuracies. Your valid points get completely lost in the sea of hostility, exaggerated claims, and venom they are swimming in.

Either way, I won't trouble you again. Thanks for taking my points into consideration. I really do hope this update improves your opinion of your phone, and that the next one from MS will address more of the issues you are worried about. I myself am hoping they will add the very simple to achieve orientation lock...

You say they are inaccurate claims, but they aren't. Nokia already issued one update to cure the problem, and up until this update I saw no changes. I haven't had a lot of time to take photos with it after this update, but they were very clearly not equal to that of their competitors. Taking pictures with my 4S in one hand and the 920 in the other showed a very clear difference in quality, and the 920 always lost. If you think I'm wrong, I don't mind. But don't tell me that what I've said is inaccruate when it clearly isn't. If the camera didn't have a serious issue of being a blurry mess then Nokia wouldn't have had to issue an update to fix it once already. I still don't think it's good enough in daylight shots to warrant the hyperbolic praise it gets. Night shots are incredible, but it's fair to middling everywhere else.
I'm still not getting a good explination on why Other storage is rendering phones unuseable. There's no reason that it should take up 20% or more of a phones storage, and it's a bug that shouldn't ever exist. Again, every smartphone I've owned prior to this one had no such issues. I've never had to factory reset a phone because it decided that storing things, whatever they were should take up so much space as to render the phone unuseable do to lack of storage.
I love Windows Phone 8 after leaving iOS. However, even with the awesome interface it has there are some incredibly huge holes in the basic features that smartphones have had for easily 5-7 years. They hit the UI out of the park, it's amazing. But they fall flat on their faces when it comes to bare bones features of mobile phones, much less sophisticated smartphones.
I am a bit brash, but I don't mind if you ignore what I have to say. I don't mean that maliciously either. I'm not personally assaulting anyone, and just because I have very valid criticisms of the platform, let's face it they are going nowhere fast releasing games that are two years old or more as a "big release" (to quote Joe Belfiore), that doesn't mean I don't like it. I really do. It's a great OS, but they are 5-6 years behind on the basics and show no indication that anything is going to change.
Hell, this is Nokia cleaning up their mess!
EDIT: What I was getting at with the other storage problem is that I went from 6GB (20%) to 3GB (~10%) used. Then I cleared my "temp cache" to 0 bytes, restarted the phone, checked immediately after restarting and my other went back up to 4GB and temp went to 4.5GB used. That's without doing anything other than simply restarting the phone. There is ZERO excuse for this. I don't want an OS that doesn't manage storage like this. It's a serious flaw and in needs to be fixed now, not later; now. Instead of convincing devs to release two year old games on the platform, they need to divert some of that terrible negotiating skills to fixing problems with the OS. And there are many problems that need to be fixed.

There's not a whole lot of point in debating this fiurther... I guess I would just reiterate a few quick comments:

(1) I agree with nearly all of the basic points you are making. I want MS to fix the few bugs they have and add a lot of polish, with things they are missing (like orientation lock, volume profiles, notifiaction center, etc). I also would love for them to be more transparent on how some things like Other storage are working (or not working).
(2) I already pointed out some of the things you said that I felt were inaccurate... you seem to be assuming that when I say your posts include inaccuracies, that I am actaully saying it is 100% inaccurate. I'm not. I'm just saying there have been some inaccuracies and confrontational statements. No need to belabour them further imo... we may agree or dissagree. :)
(3) I feel like your more recent posts have been much more calm, and I appreciate that. Thanks!

I did jump ship. To Windows Phone 8 from iOS. Imagine my surprise when I found out you can't even set what sound your phone makes when you get an email. Did you not hear the jopkes about everyone pulling out their iPhone when one dinged because you didn't know who's phone had actually made the noise? Yeah, it's like that. But 5 years later.
I love WP8 and my 920, but I can't help but wonder WTH Microsoft has been doing since 2005 because they sure don't seem to have been looking at what modern smartphones have as basic features. I don't hate them, I just wonder where the hell they've been for about 10 years and how they plan on catching up after falling so far behind. Them making a huge deal out of releasing 2 year old games sure isn't a step in the right direction. Neither is offering a whopping $100 or whatever it was to app developers to join the platform. At current successful app developer sales and commision to make apps, that's like 15 minutes of actual work. The very good Tweetbot app developer mentioned that he wouldn't even consider a WP8 app for development because it's costing him more than that to write code in 15 minutes. That's not how you grow your platform, and I'm sure more than one successful developer has laughed in their faces at that offer. What on Earth made them think that was an attractive offer for anyone?

i'm confused - when you say you can't define which sound your phone makes when you receive an email, are you referring to custom sounds, or selecting one from a set of stock sounds which one you hear when receiving a new email?

You can't set any custom sounds other than the ringtone, and ringtone per contact as far as I know. I don't understand why that wasn't included, it's been a staple of having a cell phone for 10 years. I HATED that it took the iPhone 4 years to get this ability, and was dismayed to find out that you still can't do this in WP8. It's such an easy feature to implement that I don't understand how Microsoft could just not include it, and have said absolutely nothing about an update to make it possible. It became a cell phone industry joke to see a handful of people pull out their iPhones when one made a noise because no one knew if it was their phone or not. I don't even have sounds enabled simply because it grates my ears to hear the dumb sounds that are included. If Microsoft doesn't include it anytime soon maybe Nokia will pick up the ball (again) to make up for Microsoft airballing yet again.

The fact that you only check email every few days may be what is causing this to load up. What provider is your email? Are you using Hotmail or something else. If your phone is not syncing changes back to the server then it may be storing data thinking that some day it might. If you can, you may want to switch to an email provider that allows you to sync on push. I have not known anyone who only syncs email every couple of days. All my accounts are on push. Maybe this solves your problem.

I use my medotcom email address(es), and there's still absolutely no reason that it should cause my phone to eat up 2.8GB of storage for just email. It's ludicrous that would even be possible. I don't sync it because, like many things on WP8 that I've found, it doesn't work entirely correctly so I just ignore it most of the time. (Podcasts and the music player being but two terrible apps on WP8)
And the newly minted Nokia storage page in setting says I have less than 70 mb of data in that category. That isn't my problem, there's something for more serious to this issue, and it is very widespread. If not syncing email causes it to eat up storage space to the point of having to factory reset a phone, they have a serious issue that they need to fix.

Woo hoo! Nokia also added new timeout options which I've been wanting for a long time, you can now go beyond 5 mins. to 15, 30 and never.. can keep my music meta data displaying during commute w/out having to unlock the phone every 5 mins. :) Thanks Nokia. :)

Anyone else noticing LTE/data seems a lot slower since the update? I'm going to restart the phone again, but it seems like it's capped now or something. The download for the HERE Maps and Drive are 7MB each. A 7MB download over LTE used to take about 20 seconds. It's now taking over a minute. Very disappointed with this change.

I rebooted the phone again and download is still taking about 3-4 minutes for 7 MB. It's definitely slower than before the update. I keep the phone next to my speakers at work, so I can always hear the LTE chiping when I get emails, messages, etc. Instead of a high-pitched squeal during the downloads, it's much more sporadic. There is a definite difference now.

I'm in the same boat as Seth. Phone post update worked fine at my apt on wi-fi, but now at work without wi-fi I can't pull any web sites that I previously had no issue pulling. Can't even get email. Soft update didn't resolve. Signal swaps between LTE to No Service.

This firmware is bad. My phone froze for the first time yesterday. And I'm seeing the same thing that you are with data. I'll see LTE with 5/5 bars, but data won't move. After about 10 seconds of that it goes to No Service. I can hear the LTE communication in my desktop speakers, though. Then after about 5 more seconds it goes back to LTE and if it works, it works slowly.

This is simply a NOKIA Firmware update for the device. It would have to be an OS update from MS to remove Google Sync. As far as I know, Google Sync has only been removed from WP 7.8 and CalDav support should be added by GDR3.

Yup... I went through the settings line by line and then discovered it at the bottom! (You would think it would be integrated into the Phone Storage category somehow).
Now that it let me clear out temp files manually, I reduced 'other' from 9GB to 3GB. Awesome.

I like it so I can leave my display active while my phone is in the charging cradle on my desk or while I'm using the music player in my car. And yes, you just hit the power button. The screen never times out on its own.

The GPS apps I have already leave the screen on (Drive and Garmin StreetPilot). But that would be cool for musiuc.

However, can you embed functionality that complex in the NFC tag? From what I have seen it only does one thing... like open the lockscreen settings. Then you would have to change the timeout and start the app yourself. Or can you program multi-step operations like that?

No multi-Activity in NFC for wp8, or at least It didnt work for me. The appstore is full of crippled nfc Writer Apps, if i remember correctly the only single one capable of adding multiple commands into a single tag is the nfc interactor, all other just sucks in this. And even if interactor added the 2 activities, the phone just completed the 1st found in the tag. Dont forget, that no 3rd party app is allowed to make any changes to any of the system settings (like change volume, brightness, connect to bluetooth car system etc.) and also dont forget that you must acknowledge all nfc activity everytime it happens, no matter how innocent thing it want to perform, or if you have acknowledged that same tag 1000 times before. Thanks for castrating this functionality so efficiently MS, good job! My colleague sitting next to me launched some Sony NFC utility on his phone, and created some complex multi-step macro on his android (for example turn wifi on + turn GPS on + set Volume to 100% + set brightness to 100%, all within a nice icon-driven utility, written to a single nfc tag ). When i showed in contrast my shiny wp8 can open system settings for me (after acknowledgeing the action with two clicks) so i can manually switch my bluetooth on, he just laughed on me. Now thats the use of nfc on wp8 today, any Sony user has all the rights to laugh on any wp8 owner.

Hey. Its not the proximity sensor, its dust trapped in the upper right corner of the phone which blocks the sensor. You can get compressed air to flush it out and also clear your FFC. If you have strong lungs, you can simply blow out the dust like I did and it should work fine. Trust me its the dust.

I agree that it's dust on the sensor that's causing this issue, but this update seems to fix that problem. My phone had the issue with the proximity sensor for roughly 4 months now and I can see that there's dust in there. For the life of me, I can't seem to flush the dust out with compressed air. Luckily, this update seems to make the proximity sensor less sensitive to dust. It was the first thing I tested after installing the update and it seems that all is fixed now. I can finally hang up on someone or put them on speaker.

Not for me its not, definitely 100% software related. I have no dust trapped, I have used compressed air, pressed down on the corner, no screen protector, tried the restart in a dark room, nothing works. It fixed itself once but after restarting the phone it came back and has been this way since which says to me that it is definitely a software/firmware problem.
I've just put up with it as I'm not patient enough to wait 2 weeks while it got fixed and given the reports on the repair jobs being done, I wasn't convinced that it would get fixed anyway. Looks like this firmware update finally addresses the issue.

As per my other reply, I tried this a number of times, while I think it worked once, it hasn't worked since.
I'm thinking that the one time it worked was a fluke due to the fact I'm convinced that mine has a software problem, looks like I'm not the only one if Nokia are changing the settings with this latest firmware.

I wouldn't say that Nokia Maps is the culprit. Nokia Maps uses the downloaded map from the System. Offline map storage might be under System or Other.
Looking at my storage check, HERE Drive+ takes up around 32MB and HERE Maps takes up around 23MB.

I sincerely hope that this secretly resolves the "battery drain issue" that I've had.
In fact, I'm on my third Lumia 920 now, and ALL OF THEM have had the same issue. It was not true of the Lumia 820, which worked fine, but I can easily repro it on the 920. My co-worker's 920 has the same problem, as do many others. Sad :(